


The Coverhook, or, Of Beginnings

by abbichicken



Category: Invitation to the Game - Monica Hughes
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Angst, Dystopia, Female Friendship, Friendship, Gen, Misses Clause Challenge, Robots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-23
Updated: 2014-12-23
Packaged: 2018-03-01 22:00:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2789204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/abbichicken/pseuds/abbichicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scenes from Lisse and Benta's friendship, through time and space.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Coverhook, or, Of Beginnings

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Chibifukurou](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chibifukurou/gifts).



> Dear, dear recipient - thank you for such a wonderful challenge! I actually ended up doing this, quite at the last minute, for my NaNoWriMo, so, there's at least another 50,000 words, spiralling out in all kinds of directions. I do really hope to do something more with the rest of it, but there's a lot more work that it all needs, and experimental half-finished stuff is nobody's decent Yuletide gift! It comes as snapshots, a couple of, sort of, deleted scenes...I went for 'less is more', and tried to keep Benta and Lisse's relationship and Lisse's ~feelings central to it all. Genuinely, I had such a great time wrangling this, and I'd love to post more sometime. Many, many thanks; I hope it brings a little joy or interest!

Mine was a feather, simplified so that it looked like the bones of a feather, a curved line, pointed at its end, a stretch of roundings coming off it, all the way up one side, all the way back down the other. It might be falling from the sky, I thought, six years old and hanging my coverall up on the brass hook that sat neatly beneath the icon with some difficulty, my fingers and thumbs fumbling to position the weight of the stiff new cloth.

I hadn’t had any expectations, I hadn’t really thought about what it would be like to leave everything I knew behind and be taken so far away. I hadn’t imagined saying goodbye to everyone I'd known in my life up to this point, nor had I thought about how it would be to enter the vast, grand old house that would be my home for the next ten years for the first time.

I hadn’t thought about anything much at all, except, perhaps, to wonder if I might make a friend. I had had friends in the past, the two girls that lived in my block, for example, Frida and Anya, with whom I’d whiled away empty days playing teacher in the dirt. But it was difficult to keep friends, to care about them, when you knew that in a matter of time you’d be whisked away to a new school where everything you’d become would be waiting for you.

I asked the guardian once what I would be when I grew up. He shrugged. “In another world, my dear little Lisse, you could have touched the stars. In this world? Perhaps you will teach. Perhaps you’ll learn computing. Perhaps, though…well. Ten years is a long time.”

And I didn’t ask him much more about the future, or me, or my future, because he looked so sad in the eyes as he said those things to me, and they didn’t make sense then, or even all that much sense later on, and when they did, far, far in my future, I wished I had never asked the question at all, and that I’d asked something old, something else, something about the past instead. I was so little. I didn't know what I couldn't learn later.

It’s too late now.

I can’t ever go back.

I’ll never see him again. I mean, I knew I wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Like my parents. I couldn't see them again. I didn't remember them, like some of the others in the home did. But to look back from Prize, and wonder where I came from, wonder, as I do sometimes, watching our own private galaxy spin and cluster and shine, how I can tell the story of here, when I don’t know all that much about myself, about my home, about how I am who I am, and how I am where I am. Why it is that I had that symbol on my coverhook, if I chose it, if it chose me, if it was chosen for me…

“It’s not a feather,” said a girl with gleaming auburn hair, pushing its way from her head at every least likely angle. She had a bright, bossy sort of voice, and a sparkle in her green eyes. “It’s a quill,” she said, as if correcting a statement I’d made.

Up until that point, I hadn’t said anything at all.

“What’s a quill?” I asked.

The girl’s smile broadened.

“It’s a sort of a pen. My dad showed me how to make one. You get a feather and you cut it in a way and then you can dip it into things, like paint or water, if you want to write on dry things, or a special ink sort of thing, but I just write in the dust with it. It’s very nice. But it can be squashed, and the feathers go all stringy, and that’s stupid.”

“A sort of pen…” I repeated. It didn’t seem likely, but then, neither did the girl in front of me. Frida once told me a story her grandmother had told her (and she’d said that her grandmother had told her that story so that was a really old one) about a girl with red hair and freckles all over her face, who was so strong, she could carry a horse, instead of riding upon it. I thought that Frida must have got it the wrong way around somehow, but this girl looked like she could not only carry a horse, but a house, if she so felt like it. Even then, even when I was so small, and so out of place, I knew right away that there was a warmth to her, something I wanted to draw nearer to, and stay right next to, and...absorb. I didn't want her to go away.

“I’m Benta,” she said, and of course she was, and so she still is. More than any of us, Benta remains nothing less than her very self. From here, I can see her working in the field. She and Katie have drawn out plans for the crops they want to come up in the spring, and she’s knelt in the dust, her clothes flapping about her in the early morning breeze as she tries to get seeds sown before the rains start, and wash them all away.

“My name is Lisse,” I replied, and we held out both hands to each other and grasped them, not a gesture we’d been taught, but one that happened, just because.

We were broken apart by a small, mousy-haired boy who shoved his way between us, making noisy bus sounds. He hurtled through the crowd of children, until a man in a grey coverall appeared in the doorway.

“Paul!” he barked, and the boy stopped flat in the middle of his trajectory. He looked around, as if unsure as to where the call had come from.

The man stepped forwards, and spoke to us all.

“I know it’s an important day,” he said, “and I know there are a lot of new things for you all to learn, but, if you could do it without causing any disturbance to each other, I would appreciate it.”

Some of us looked at the floor. Others looked around, wondering if they should respond. Benta took one of my hands again, and gave it a squeeze, as if to say, “aren’t we clever?” At least, that’s how I took it. We were somehow doing the right thing, whilst others amongst us were not.

The boy, Paul, had put his hands into the pockets of his grey trousers, and was edging back towards the wall, like he might just melt away into our crowd.

“I can’t wait to see our room,” Benta said to me.

“Our room?” I repeated. Again, I hadn’t really thought about this. At home, I hadn’t had a room, so much as a bed amongst many others. I used to read until I fell asleep in, on, or around a book. I didn't know all the words to them, especially to the older ones, but I would make them up so that they made sense to my small mind. I’d often continue stories straight into my dreams, and let the excitement of the tale guide me through worlds, on the backs of dragons, on quests from one place to another, into courts or palaces or gardens…it was natural as anything to me to live inside a book.

I couldn’t bring any with me - they wouldn’t fit in my bag, and anyway, there were no books on our list of things to bring - but my guardian promised me there would be books here, just like there had been in the home. “You’ll have to study plenty of them,” he said. “Lessons to learn.”

I thought I’d like that. Learning. Becoming. Growing up. I was excited.

“I wonder if there are any chickens here?” Benta said, as we were directed to file from the long cloakroom down a narrow corridor that twisted and turned through a suite of small rooms, each furnished with a bare desk, a plain chair, a set of empty shelves.

“Chickens?”

“You know, birds. You can eat them.”

I didn’t know, not really. I’d never seen one. We didn’t have that sort of thing in the town the home was in. We had the laboratories and the workshops around us. There weren't really any homes, and certainly there was nothing like a farm. The ground wasn’t good for growing things, nor for keeping stock. We ate bread and vegetables and a sort of meat, but I didn't know anything about them. And for breakfast I would have a powder which was mixed with water. They called it yoghurt, and I thought it was the most delicious thing.

That was the first thing I missed at school - my yoghurt. They didn’t have it. Breakfast, in my first year at the Government School, was a large hard biscuit which tasted sweet, but not in a good way. It took a long time to chew and swallow, and it always got boring before I finished it, but we had to finish them, because otherwise we wouldn’t be able to grow up properly and be strong enough to work. So they said, then, at least.

In the Great Hall we were joined by as many children again, and then double that.

“We are so proud to welcome all one hundred and fifty of you to the school this year,” a large man in a dark suit said, striding onto a platform that meant we only had to crane our necks up a bit, and only I and one or two others had to stand on our toes to see him. “You will be the largest year in the school to date, and, as the newest, the lucky recipients of youth in this great age, the weight of expectation will rest heavy upon you all. But be light! Be joyous. You have a long time to learn, to acquire all the tools you’ll need to succeed in this world. We will teach you what you need, but we will also be mindful of the people you can become, the careers you shall pursue. Those of you with expectation, positions in mind, families already eagerly awaiting your fully-grown return to the nest, we shall train you as required. And the rest of you, we have everything you need to follow your true path. Be excited. Be brave. Be yourself. Everything you do here will lead you into the best possible position in society. Do not accept anyone who tells you otherwise. You can always do a little more. We only want to give each and every one of you the very best chance to find the perfect job when our work here is done.”

I wonder if he’s been replaced by a robot too, now. Probably.

If Earth will continue under a string of robots, robotting about, caring for each other. Ordering each other around. If the government will leave too, or if they are the captains of some planetary sinking ship, all sitting around a great round table at the end of everything, drinking whisky and talking, as the city disappears into a shift of clanking and whirring and mechanical busy work. As the country falls, the continents divide under robots, all around, every one of them more sophisticated than the last, more capable than their predecessors, evolving in design like our own entertainment systems once did, like our own knowledge. Like humans, but not. Not at all.

I don’t miss them here, on Prize. Watching. Judging. Balancing. I like that, here, my mistakes are my own.

When we started at the school, the only robots were the cleaners. The first one we met was in our dormitory. As names were called, Benta squeaked with delight to be named right after me. “I knew it!” she whispered, conspiratorial as a storybook under the covers.

When we found our dormitory, I was all ready to make a dive for a good bed, I didn’t know what this dormitory would be like, but I so wanted it to be like the tales of school I had read from before. And it was, in many ways. Bedframes stacked three high in a high-ceilinged, wood-panelled room. But Benta didn’t leap to grab a good one with me. She stood in the doorway, then slid to one side of it, half-hiding, eyes wide and shining. It took me a moment to realise that she was staring at the robot cleaner, which had been putting finishing touches to the place, squaring clean linen onto an empty, unclaimed new bed. Once it had finished doing so, it retreated to the door, and she leapt inside, diving away from it.

“What is it?” I asked, encouraging her to come over.

She was trembling, paled so her freckles had sunk without trace into her skin.

She didn’t say anything.

“The robot?” I asked, encouraging a response.

She nodded, weakly.

“But haven’t you seen one before?”

She shook her head.

“But…”

The other girls - we were all girls - were claiming bunks all about us, but Benta sat down on the lower bunk in the corner, and continued to shake. I patted her on the shoulder, without really thinking about it. I didn’t know if the other children were pretending they couldn’t see what was happening, or were genuinely so interested in claiming their own space in the room that they hadn’t noticed, but, regardless, we were outside their business.

“It’s so…it’s just like a person.”

It’s true, they do. The robots. They look just like people. But silver, and angled. They move in silence, sometimes, the newer ones, or with gentle whirs, if they’re the ones like I’m used to. The domestic that just left is older than most I’m familiar with - it creaked a bit, and its build was duller than most. They don’t have faces, not really. And they aren’t shaped like people.

I’m writing once more for Prize, for my daughter, to try and explain everything, to try and pass on what life was like, what my life was like, at least, and how it felt to be six years old and to meet a girl who had never met a robot before.

It’s harder than I’d expected.

)____________________

The school is huge. It’s dark. It’s grey. Everything about it looks like a home, but everything about it feels like a prison, on the bad days. And that’s not so bad, either. I mean, there are senses in which it seems like it would be cosy to be in a prison and to be there, just, with nowhere else to be and everything about the place being safe enough to keep us for as long as we need and strong enough to protect us in case we should need that too.

We know that things are hard in the world outside, and are getting harder. We know that things have been difficult and dangerous, and that there are times when it’s fortunate that we’ve been of school age. But most of all, we are only at school, and that is it and all that we should be doing and that’s a huge relief in itself. I relish, for all of my years, being at school. When I was in the home before, we didn’t have lessons or structure or anything that really broke up the day, and so I spent all my time filling it as best I could myself, with books and stories and daydreaming. I wondered what school itself would be like, and I always wished that it was time to go to it because I was so sure that it would be where I was meant to be, where I would fit in in a way that I never quite did in the home.

We were all split up, sent to many different places. It was supposed to help us, they said, but I never worked out how. I suppose perhaps because the other children didn’t know anyone when they arrived either, so in that sense there were no strange advantages, and there weren’t any cliques formed, and it made it a bit easier for us to just get on and be like everyone else, but that didn’t sink in for a long time after.

The polished hall floor and the corridors leading off it all smell strongly of cleaning chemicals, especially first thing in the morning.

I don’t know if I miss that smell, that feeling, those walls around me being everything I know I’ll see for the foreseeable. I don’t know if I appreciated it as much. I had what I know now, that I’m in the right place, that everything about who I am and what I do is in the right place at the right time and that I am being sustained, cared for, in the most basic of ways. I liked the way it felt, that I wasn’t lost or left behind. I read books, later in my school career, about what it was like for the orphans of old, those without their parents to raise them, in whatever circumstances there were. They used to be sent to wander the streets of London, to do nothing and everything, to be used and told who they were and what they were for by anyone on the street bigger, richer or more demanding than they knew how to fight off. My heart would ache for them, for the past, for those times when there was no safety net for children like me, who didn't have anyone to bring them up into anything in particular, who needed to be sent somewhere that cared and had their futures at heart.

I didn’t think I could survive in that kind of old world. I would read those things and look at the walls around me and be so incredibly grateful for everything about where I was and where I lived now and who I might be being trained to be, because I couldn’t see how I would survive it all.

This is why I cared so much for that last day, that moment when I would find out what it was that I was being made into, who it was that I would become.

It's also why, once we opened our results, and found ourselves on the bus to the city, to nothing and nowhere we knew to start all over again, I felt so abandoned. The very people I'd always assumed would care for me, had truly believed had by best interests at heart. Like an orphan all over again, I was now abandoned not by a parent, but by the state, and the everything and everyone I’d ever known. It seemed that everything around me had been a lie, and I was out there, on the streets, with nothing and nobody but my little orphan gang. We had been raised to believe that we were valuable. And then we weren’t.

But…that’s not quite true, is it? There was some value in us. We were valuable to each other. This point at which I thought I knew the score...wasn't the whole truth. That only emerged later. Each of us did something, whether we recognised how good it was or wasn’t, each of us had some kind of power that we could exert to push our group for the better, whether it was feeding or clothing us, seeing the dangers ahead of us, or defending each other when we needed it. We might not have been seen as valuable by society, in that we weren’t launched straight into its structure for its second appraisal and enjoyment, but we were let out into an environment in which we needed each other far more than we ever had at school.

Suddenly all the little tests and games that we played at school seemed to make more sense. We must have done well in assessments we had no idea would affect our futures just as much as the essays and the sums we were doing. No idea at all. Would we have done anything differently if they had been up front with us? I wonder.

I doubt it, though. If anything, we might have done worse, just because some of us would have been so conscious about wanting to do well. As it was, just because we were able to do what we naturally would, several of us wanted to be perfect anyway, and some of the others just enjoyed not being in lessons. This, retrospectively, seems just as useful, doesn’t it?

Whatever, it brought us here. Eventually. But it's easy to get caught up in those fears, and thoughts. How close was I to never being chosen to play the Game? To going to a different DA? To going into work of some straight and dull sort, in the regular Earth world. I'll never know. Sometimes being here doesn't quite feel like enough.

)_________________

The most difficult part is remembering what it was like to never know the brightness, the warmth, the emptiness of our new home. I wonder - I worry, often, I worry in the darkest part of the night - about how Prize will grow and change and evolve. I wonder if there’s some course we could set the very history of this place on, right now, that would have us bear in a better direction, learn from the flaws and faults of Earth. But then again, Earth was an old world. And every old world must, I suppose, find its own breaking point. I hope, then, that Prize’s is far, far away.

I’m sure if we wanted we could build robots soon - we have the minerals, we have the knowledge. But would we want to?

“What are they for?” Benta asked me, late that first night, back where we were before, so small, so new, just starting out in our latest incarnation of the world. Benta lay next to me in my bed, close and not wanting to move up to her bunk in the upper corner. It was silent in the room; the other girls seemed dutifully asleep.

“The robots?"

"Yes," she whispered, sounding a little nervous, like this might be something we weren't supposed to talk about. They had that air to some of us, I had noticed. They weren't the norm. I'd seen them aplenty at the home - they didn't just clean, but staffed, cooked, served, and monitored. They never struck me as something to fear.

"They do things that we don’t want to do," I explained. "They do things that there weren’t enough of us to do, when the pollution happened.”

I said it like that, then. When the pollution happened. I didn’t really know all that much about it then, I was just repeating things I'd heard other people say to each other, or had seen on the headlines of the telescreen in the home offices, which displayed the latest happenings in bullet points all day every day. Benta and I would study the pollution together aplenty over the years that followed. She couldn’t understand it, couldn’t then, when I was trying to explain to her what it even was, and how it had been responsible for the weather that left her farm one of the very few in our land to continue to exist. She couldn’t understand it later, either. Why would people want things that destroyed our beautiful land? She’d ask me as if I knew, as if I might have the answers, as if I could speak for everyone that had gone before, somehow..

I suppose that’s what I’m still doing here, isn’t it? Speaking for us all. Yet when you look back to everything I wrote about that short time between school and here - not all that short, but it feels a flash when I consider how every moment of every day here is something to treasure and enjoy…I spent so much of those in-between days wishing, waiting, hoping for another invitation to The Game. Regardless, when I look back I see so much I didn’t know. Didn’t want to become involved in. Paths we could easily have gone down. I wonder if faces from school would be amongst those in the clubs and the cafes and the disorder, or if, now, we are all being sent elsewhere. Are there other Prizes, where the presumed-wasters of society have been sent, given their own chance to build a thing? And how similar or different might it be? Perhaps in their own loss and experience they might hold just as relevant a gift as Katie, or Trent, or Scylla, or Brad. Perhaps they’re here, on another side of this world. I worry for that too…but that’s a tangent too far for this time.

Speaking for us all - am I doing us an injustice? Now, when we're not just us, but also them. The second group. I don’t even know if everyone went to schools like ours. We never met anyone else, not really, nobody from the outside for long enough to learn anything about them. And how well, truly, did I know Earth? It’s the cumulative truth we learnt before we began school that’s all we really have to offer. Perhaps our parents’ experience, if we knew it, perhaps, but that’s not always all that much, not least in my case. Maybe even now, when I try to talk about Earth, I’m no better than Benta was then, small and sad and confused and trying to work out how things could be so different from her farm with her family and their animals and the corn.

When we had dinner first that night, she didn’t eat anything, just pushed the grains around her plate.

When morning came, I’d hardly slept, still digesting everything I’d seen that day. Part of it was excitement, I’m sure, part nerves - what would school be like? Benta, though, slept soundly, dropped off almost in mid-sentence. A bell rang outside our room to call us, I supposed, for breakfast.

We had all been issued our coveralls as we walked through the door, and there was some conversation about whether or not we were supposed to wear them during the day. Benta suggested, loudly and suddenly, that we should all do the same thing, and then that way nobody would get into trouble. It was nice, that first moment, when everyone smiled and we all dolled up in our issued gear. The coveralls were stiff, even over cotton underthings they chafed a bit, and we had to help each other zip them up, because our small fingers struggled with the new zips. They didn’t feel cheap, but they were quite different from anything I’d known.

The coveralls didn’t last - by the time we got to our third year they were replaced by beautiful supersoft uberpractical techwear that could do things like absorb dirt and release it as tiny, microscopic bursts of steam - but I always liked them.

At breakfast, Benta once more pushed the food around her plate, frowning reluctantly at it. A serving robot slid its way around the tables, apparently eyeing up our progress, and Benta began to shake again.

“What’s wrong?” I ask her once more.

“I can’t eat this…” she says, her voice cracking with the strain of admitting to something that she fears, I can tell, is silly. Everyone else is wolfing down their food as if it’s the first meal they’ve had in a week. “It’s…it’s not right.”

It would take me quite some time to understand the sorts of things she’d been used to. We just didn’t have that in my home, not the real food, not the overflow of misshapen vegetables and unexpectedly cracked eggs or an excess of cream. I didn’t have the chance to eat and eat until I wasn’t just full, but more than that, and we didn’t have the outside space for me to run and play around so that I burnt all that goodness right into me. It had only been a few hours I’d known her, but it already seemed as if Benta was leaking the light and excitement from her right in front of me.

Scylla, a bold-looking, loud girl was sat opposite us. She’d been the first to agree about how we all ought to dress in our coveralls together, and now she addressed us both as if we were a unit, which I liked. “Where are you from?” No further words than that, just the starter.

“A farm,” Benta said, and the wobble in her voice was still there. “A farm out far from here and with so much space…and so much food.”

“Really?” Scylla asked, with a genuine interest and amazement. “As if anyone would want more of this!”

I tried to explain about Benta having had different food, sort of coming to her defence, but I couldn’t quite do it, because, well, I’d had fresh meat and boiled eggs and cream and even toffee once, boiled up butter and cream and that rarity, such a rarity, sugar, and it was like a different universe for a moment, just like walking into anything so old as our school was a whole different world from everything I’d ever known before.

“I’ll show you one day,” Benta said. “I’ll bring some back from the next time we get to go home.”

“We get to go home?” Scylla replied, turning it into a question.

“…don’t we?” Benta followed, turning to me with wide eyes.

It occurred to me that I really didn’t know. It wasn't as if I had a home to go back to. Surely they wouldn't, couldn't take me back there? Would I just stay here? Who would remain? Who else was like me? Was anyone? Was the bus going to come back for everyone else one day, and just...leave me behind?

Without the answer at my fingertips, and with my own doubts cropping at my thoughts, I couldn’t reassure Benta in time, and her eyes filled with tears which spilt immediately to the table.

“I’m so sorry…” Scylla said, leaping in at the sight of Benta's discomfort. “I didn’t mean to upset you. Are you homesick?”

She was the very meaning of the word.

Indeed, I’m not sure Benta has ever stopped being homesick. Even now. Even though this is home, and I know she loves working with the soil here, being with us all the time, even though everything is good enough, there’s a part of her that is always as sad as that moment at the breakfast table where she realised that there could be something between her and that first, strongest, most heartfelt idea of home that she had back then.

I never saw the farm. Indeed, I never saw a farm at all, not back home, not for real. We were supposed to go and visit one with school once, but they closed it down and reassigned the land to a new factory complex, and so we read about them and looked at pictures and maps of them instead. I always feel like that’s the gap between us, that I couldn’t see the idyllic land she saw in her mind. I’d never known idyll before Prize. That’s why, perhaps, I was so desperate for it where the others were sometimes less willing to sacrifice sleep for running, time for planning. That’s why it was so important to me to get back here, every time why I thanked all of the stars in the sky - before I even knew how many stars it was possible to have in one sky - for everything that had conspired to bring me here. Whatever it might have been.

“What are you going to be?” I asked Scylla, when I had the chance to change the conversation. It was the other main thing we wondered of each other. I always tried to get in there first, and then to prolong the conversation for as long as possible. Everyone I asked seemed so sure of their answer.

“An artist,” Scylla said, and when I said that wasn’t a thing, she smiled broadly and said that in a world where everyone has such wonderful jobs, there will have to be things for people to spend their hard-earned money on. That much was definitely true, and, of course, she'd remind me happily of how true it was much later in the DA. “But,” she added quickly, “if you like, I’ll paint you something for free. I could try to paint you an egg,” she said to Benta, who giggled, suddenly, in spite of herself.

“I’d like that,” she said. So Scylla did. It was a grey egg.

“Eggs aren’t grey,” Benta said, reflexively, when presented with her painting, some time later. But then she tilted her head to the side, and thought about it for a second, and looked at Scylla, and I think, I think at that moment she realised that it wasn’t the case that everyone had automatically seen eggs for themselves, not in their natural state, at least, and she said, seeing Scylla’s face show all kinds of tension, “but perhaps they should be!”

Scylla looked pleased.

“After all,” Benta continued, “this is art.” She said it as if it was somebody else’s words, as if they hadn’t quite come from her own head and she hadn’t meant to say it exactly like that, but she had, and now she was just going to hold onto that, and that was all fine.

“It is,” Scylla said, “and I’ll paint you more eggs if you like, in all of the colours!”

I wished, must later, that I’d thought to exclaim, on emerging out onto Prize, “Eggs aren’t grey!” Because of course, ours sort of was. But obviously I was far too unwell at that time for it to make sense. Which was a shame. It could have been the first joke on Prize!

We counted firsts a lot for a while. But without anywhere to keep a record of them, they ended up just being all different kinds of arguments, and that wasn’t useful at all.

)___________

“When are you up to?” Benta asks, flopping down next to me.

“Day two at the Government School…” I say, not looking up.

She puts an arm around me and pulls me towards her like a comfortable dog. “Remember when I wouldn’t eat breakfast?”

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about…” I say.

“I wouldn’t go back to eating that paste now,” she says, coming out prickly with the memory of it. “I’d rather starve…”

“Back on Earth, you would starve,” I point out.

“I don’t know how we did it,” she says, with a sigh on the end of it.

Looking at my daughter, I’m just glad I don’t have to put her through those things. The more time we’ve spent here, the more I feel like I’ve been sloughing off an old skin. Day by day, such tiny effects, but increasingly I’m just…better. Happier. Brighter. It’s like when we transformed just to play The Game, but millionfold. Every cell of me is all the better for everything we have here, and the chemicals, the synth food and fabric, the things we made from almost nothing back on Earth because we had almost nothing left, none of me misses them, and all of me wonders what they were doing to us.

“I want eggs,” Benta said, as we filed out of the dining room. We ate lunches in shifts, year by year. Looking around us, there were others who seemed as unaccustomed to the bland factory food as Benta - they looked almost a different species from those of us who’d grown up in homes, or homes from regular working families, for they were in colour, and we were in shades of grey. They had definition and a little fat and muscle in places, and we were soft with nothingness and sedentary life.

“I don’t think I’ve ever had an egg,” I replied, and the look I’d quickly get used to, Benta being so disbelieving, pitying and homesick all at the same time, shone upon me.

Our first lesson was not so much a lesson as a test: despite the fact that we all underwent many kinds of tests before we even arrived at school (letters, numbers, physical, all the rest of it - so many of these tests happened to me, I realise I have forgotten that they should be marked, mentioned. We don’t know, now, what was important to who, and when, and where and why…and I’m trying to mention everything). This test was on knowledge - where we were, what we understood of the world, even, I supposed, what we understood of the questions. Who was His Excellency? Where did we live? When was the last war, and what was it about? The last one there, I had no idea. None of us did, talking to each other afterwards.

“Maybe it’s the things they’re going to teach us about,” Karen said, in what seemed to be an attempt to reassure me. I liked her. She was quiet and seemed to know more than most of us. I figured she would be a useful friend to have.

I didn’t mind tests, although thinking about them coming up made me anxious. It still does, sometimes. We’ve started to talk about what we’ll do to teach our children on Prize. Benta says we should just let them all do all the things that we do, and that that way they’ll learn everything in their own time, as they’re ready for it. I quite like that idea. I could read to them the way I sometimes read to the others when they’re doing their various jobs and chores. We could make up stories together the way Trent and I do sometimes, improvising the ridiculous, just because we can. The others already mocked me for talking to my unborn baby, but she’s grown so quickly, and I think she’ll talk just as much as I do any time now. Prize might be about to be a lot noisier.

We had a break, and for the first time, were allowed outside onto the grounds.

It was a warm day, muggy, grey skies and no hint of anything outside or above them. No sunshine. The air felt like it was thicker than it should have been, and it meant we didn’t feel much like running around or playing any kind of game.

There were several gardens, one very ornate one full of trees carved into various shapes that we were told was a ‘formal’ garden, which was reserved for the years nine and ten. That seemed fair enough, I thought, imagining how much wiser, taller and more different I would be, by the time I would finally be allowed into that garden.

There was a swimming pool, which frightened me somewhat, for it had never occurred to me to immerse myself in any kind of water - water, where I knew it, was the river that ran alongside the main road, and the river was full of danger. If you got any river water on you you had to wipe it right off immediately, and get sterilising cream on as soon as possible. I later learnt that that wasn’t the case everywhere, but in my town, the factories had leaked into the thing for years. I wondered, then, looking into this pool, when I would ever need to swim.

“Let’s make our own garden,” Benta said to me and Alden and Rich. Alden had sort of attached himself to me after the test because he heard me talking about the pollution, and he wanted to know more about what I knew about it. I think he thought it was a sort of monster from a book, and was quite excited by the thought of it. I felt bad correcting him. Rich came along with Alden, possibly because Alden had very neat hair, and Rich seemed upset by the scruffiness of some of the other children. There was a fearfulness to Rich that made me quite want to protect him; from what, I wasn’t sure, as nobody seemed the least bit threatening at this point, not whilst we were all so new and nervous, at least, and there wasn’t anything I could do even if they had been threatening, but nonetheless, there was some kind of instinct in me towards him. Perhaps it was the idea that I ought to look after him like a little brother.

None of us had siblings, but in the past, of course, we knew that it had happened. Sometimes we talk about that now, what that will be like for our kids, here, because, of course, we’ll need to have more than one child each, just to make sure that everything…continues as it ought to.

The idea of being a mother used to terrify me. I don’t mind telling that here, and I think it’s important. Especially that first day out in the new world, where there just…wasn’t any space for me. I assumed they’d sterilise us at some point, then, looking at the complete lack of provision for us, lack of…use for us. If they couldn’t use us, the kids they’d nurtured and promised and trained so much, I thought, then they certainly can’t use my kid for anything.

And how sad, even then, when I should have been feeling bright and brave and free, that I was thinking of us, the people, as things to be used, tools or resources, which isn’t the way anyone, surely, should ever have to think of another person, much less of the whole swathe of human race to which one belongs. Even then, I thought that everything was over, and that there was no chance to break out without risking falling foul of one side of our world or the other. The thugs, or the thought police.

I didn’t really know what thought police were, but there were rumours at school, again, like ghosts, like monsters, a threat (”I’ll get the thought police on you!”); for a long time I couldn’t sleep well for fear that I might dream something that wasn’t allowed without knowing it, and wake up to them there, picking me up and carrying me off to…I couldn’t even imagine. To nothingness, most like.

I still don’t really know what happened to those people the thought police came for, the ones that really had done something considered unforgivable, illegal. All the reactionaries, the people who weren’t, as far as we could tell, allowed into the Game. If they were sent somewhere else, or just left to rot in prisons and places out of the way where they might cause as little trouble as possible for all those who were staying on Earth.

If when the last Government representative blasted off in their magic capsule, or whatever brought us here, they’d press a button that upped the gates of these jails, and the captured, the enforced, the segregated would suddenly be free, and able to do, be, see, take anything they felt like in the dying embers of the planet.

But as Benta and Alden and Rich and I began to poke at the ground with sticks, me drawing patterns there, not knowing what else I might be supposed to do, as I looked around at the other children, finding their ways, gathering in small groups and talking, playing hopscotch, acting out games that seemed mostly to be more ‘first day at school’ things, or playing robots together, I looked at us all in our stiff new coveralls, and thought, it is good to know that we’re here, and that we’re staying here.

Sometimes I imagined that everything might go wrong, outside the school. It was strange, we would say, sometimes, that they didn’t tell us what was going on in the world, and that we didn’t know whether or not things were…okay. Sometimes Rich would tell us that ‘things might go wrong one day’ - that was the kind of phrase we all used…things might go wrong - and that we would then have to leave the school behind and go out to work early in the world. Or join the army. But I knew that we couldn’t join the army, because that was something else, that was different. You were sort of born into the army. And the army wasn’t used any more, not like it used to be. It didn’t go anywhere and fight. It was all done from the city, indoors, with computers. Back then, I assumed that, too, was all robots. I never learnt anything to the contrary.

We were in our third year when we started to talk about those things more and more. One lesson in particular stands out. Strong words, dark words, delivered as if they were any other words. It was a hard day, and it was the kind of day where I stopped trying to learn everything, and assumed that there were some things that I just shouldn’t understand.

But they weren’t real words. They didn’t make sense. They were speculative, they were distant. Looking back, I can’t work out what, from all this, they did actually want us to know. It’s almost impossible to understand what they meant by it all. It wasn’t normal, the kind of lesson we ended up having. It wasn’t sensible or useful stuff. It was weird, the way that they were trying to make things make less sense to us in some way, they were trying to make us feel worried or frightened about things that weren’t worrying or frightening, or had never been to us before, they’d never been the kind of thing that made us think we shouldn’t do the things that we were doing every day to us, they weren’t normal or worrying to us, they didn’t say exactly, don’t do this, don’t do that, that’s not how the future of all this should go, they say, well, they say all sorts of things, cautionary things, cautionary tales of one thing and another and they don’t say what we should be doing to make things better, or how we can make the world a better place, and we all seem to be particularly on edge in the lesson as it unfurls. Everybody shifts uncomfortably, and they start to tell us about how it can be when the sky falls down black or when the world goes rotten in the centre, or when the protective layers of gas that wrap us, the Earth, up so carefully and cosily are shattered and dissolved into nothing, then what? Then what? They don’t quite say. They illustrate a world that could be. That might be. But we don’t know if it is or not. We know so little about how things are and what’s outside and what it all means. They don’t tell us much. And we can’t ask questions. And we can’t help each other understand things because we know that there’s something that they did wrong here, that they made a mistake in starting to tell us about the state of things, and that it seemed to get scrambled.

Everybody is silent afterwards. You can feel the thoughts, the fear. We go out, and in our break between lessons, people don’t run out shouting to play ball, or to other classrooms to grab an extra moment here and there to work on a study project. People just walk about, or sit in corners, quietly. This is when having the robot tutors, versus having actual humans around, doesn’t always seem like such a good idea. It’s in our third year that the robots are most prevalent, as well. Perhaps that’s not a coincidence. Maybe it makes sense to have the robots introduce the difficult stuff, and then that way there’s no extra complexity on top of it. Indeed, maybe that’s one of the things that made the whole situation so difficult to endure.

The robots are as kind as machines can be, but they don’t have any interest in, or ability to, pick up on human emotions and feelings. They can’t make things better for us. And that can feel very difficult sometimes, when you just want someone to notice, when you’re feeling low and lost and awkward. It’s hard when you can’t find what you think it is that you need yourself, yet you remain absolutely convinced that somebody else ought to be able to see that it’s missing in you, and to provide it for you. It’s so difficult when you’re surrounded only by machines that you would swear should have come with this kind of attachment to make things make more sense. But there we go, and such is the way of the Government school, and it is the sort of thing that we all get used to.

I suppose it also makes for another kind of bond with us, something else that makes much more sense, considering where we are, and what we’re doing now.

There’s that sense that we have to just be enough for each other, every single day, all the time, that there aren’t any other adults or authority figures out there waiting to pick us up and dust us off and tell us that it’ll be okay. What is it that we should be doing? Taking care of each other. We have to be each other’s everything, all the time, always. We have to make everything better for each other. It’s difficult not to be worried or limited by that kind of thing when you’re small, but when you make it into your teenage years, and then you can keep going, and going, and you find that things are alright, that’s reassuring. That’s not so bad. And then when things get really bad, like they did in the DA, then we knew what to do. We did what was right. We learnt how to be good humans, by not imitating the robots.

)___________

 

“I know that we’re going to do something great,” Benta said, one grey day early on on Prize, when the anxiety of survival was passing, but the fear of forever was still coming at us each in waves, now and then. “I don’t know what it will be, and I don’t know how we’ll do it, but we will, you and me. We really will. And it will be magnificent. Everyone will be in awe of us. Everyone will look at what we do, and clap, and smile, and we’ll share it with them and we’ll be so happy together.”

“I can’t tell what on earth kind of thing you’re envisaging. Will we invent a new recipe for jam?”

“If anyone could!”

“It probably wouldn’t be me…remember when we tried to make that in our room once?”

“Yes, but we really shouldn’t have tried to boil it in the kettle…”

“I wonder if the stains will ever come out?”

“I hope not! I wonder what they’ll think happened in that room?”

“Probably best not to ask.”

Sometimes, now, in the morning, then Benta says “I know something…” and I’ll roll my eyes a bit without meaning to, and I’ll smile and wait and raise my eyebrows to hear what she’s talking about this time, and more often than not, it’s nothing in particular, it’s just Benta, and she follows it up with, “We’ll do something magnificent.”

Except now, the things that we do do actually seem to be magnificent. And we did make up a new recipe for jam. It uses these very sour, sour berries that we found, so sour that we initially thought they might be dangerous in some way, but then I accidentally left a little cloth bag of them in a cupboard that Trent made for me, and then it turned out that all they wanted was to be left in a bag in a dark cupboard before they became the sweetest, most delicious things you can imagine. And that’s also the way we, soon after, discovered that, if you take them out a bit earlier, and then if you put them in the press and squeeze and catch the juice and then leave that in a dark cupboard as well, then, then it becomes berrywine, and that’s when things here really started to get to be a lot of fun. We had to jar it, and it’s funny how quickly we developed jars once we realised that everything could be filled with wine. We all started to realise that hey, we really were making a strange kind of progress, and we really had done something magnificent that everyone would clap.

But it’s when Benta tells them all about my book, which we save, until a month after Elise is born, I’ve told her, and of course Phillip is more than familiar with it all, but the others don’t know anything about it until we get to that day, and I hold it up, and it still, even now, even after all this time with only the things we can make, takes a second for people to work out that, yes, it is a book, and yes, it was not here before, and that yes, even if the content is nothing and then some, its very existence is still the most exciting thing at least that week.

Then I look around, at the faces of all my friends, old and new, forever and always, and I see that this is a first, a real first, a wonderful first, and I did this one on my own. And I have a place, and a value, and a point. And I must always remember that, and always look back at this. We are lucky, here. We live long and healthily and in great prosperity, and we have so much joy to our time. More than I imagine any prehistoric man did the first time around.

Occasionally we discuss whether or not prehistoric man might also have beamed things in a spaceship, if he might have been sent there by someone else. Does it matter? Not really. If they did end up there like that, then how would we know?

Paul sometimes talks about the cartoons that people claim to have found, the old conspiracy theorists and references in outdated texts that historians spent centuries arguing over. He says there are lots of people that believe we, on Earth, came from somewhere else entirely. And, aren’t there all those stories of how long man lived originally? Even the holy books from olden times talk about that sort of thing. And so, wouldn’t we be seen just that way, too? I wonder, in a thousand, thousand years, if there is anything we can leave behind, if there is anything we can do to keep people guessing? If there’s anything special that we could engrave or carve, to stop people arguing in that sort of a way about how and who and when we were. I doubt it. Unless my book survives. Perhaps I can write it again in stone, like the carvings people claim to have seen and found. Perhaps we could write it a thousand times, and seal copies in every way we know.

Or perhaps it’s like Benta says. We just tell a really good story. Perhaps we just, talk about who we are, and what we do, and where we came from, and The Game we played to do it. The book will help keep the story straight, but books in themselves are nothing. You have to read them to make them worthwhile.

We’ll do something magnificent. We’ve done it already. And we can do it again. Here, forever. It's not the end of the world. It's just the beginning.


End file.
